In 1972, Berger, a London native, won the Booker Prize, Britain's chief literary honor, for his novel "G." A few years later, he moved to a village in the French Alps. Living there enriched his cosmopolitanism with a rural perspective unavailable to almost every other writer on issues of culture and social justice.

Berger's responses to the present take form in increasingly chiseled prose, in fiction and nonfiction alike. A volume of "Selected Essays" (Pantheon; 588 pages; $32.50) tracks the growth of his style.

Berger's new collection, "The Shape of a Pocket" (Pantheon; 264 pages; $24),

revisits many of his themes: the distance between an artist's experience of his work and the public's, resistance to the deadening touch of power, human interchange -- exemplified by writing and reading -- as a source of constructive energy.

A: I would say I had two educations, one from the age of about 16 to 30, when I found myself in London. The company I kept was largely European refugees from fascism -- political, mostly Jewish refugees. They were all somewhat older than I and were, I won't say unwelcome, but not very prosperous.

They were painters, writers, philosophers, historians. From these people I learned about history in a continental sense, and about politics in a sense much wider than that of the public debates going on then in England.

My second education came much later. It began about 25 years ago, when I moved to a village in the Alps. The people there, with whom I became quite close, were older peasants who had once been the children of subsistence farmers. From them I learned a lot about nature, the land, the seasons and a set of priorities by which they tried to live. I learned quite a lot of practical, physical tasks and a kind of ethical code.

Q: In the Booker Prize acceptance speech, reprinted in "Selected Essays," you announce your decision to study the lives of migrant workers. Is that what led you to move to rural France?

A: The project I announced in that speech resulted in "A Seventh Man," which I'm very proud of because it was translated into Turkish, Portuguese, Punjab and several other languages common to migrant workers in Europe. So it reached the people that it was about.

Once I met in Turkey, in what was literally a shanty town, a man who had in his house just a handful of books on a shelf. And one of them was a translation of "A Seventh Man." I found that very gratifying.

When I listened to the migrant workers, they all talked about their dreams of returning home, dreams almost never fulfilled. I realized that I could imagine their experience when they arrived in cities but could not easily imagine the life they had left behind. After I'd written "A Seventh Man," I thought I should learn about that.

Many people thought then it was a crazy idea, a backward step. Now we know that the fate of economic refugees is implicated in so many of the world's problems.

Q: What writing tool do you prefer?

A: I use a pen, a Sheaffer fountain pen, to be exact. One reason is that they make a jet black ink, the most marvelous black ink in the world, because it has other colors in it. Diluted enough it turns blue. It has a slight purple in it, too, that you can bring out by mixing in a little salt. I also draw with it.

Q: In the 1979 preface to "Permanent Red" (1960), you say that in retrospect you saw yourself as having been intellectually "trapped." Have you had that feeling since, when rereading earlier work?

A: I very seldom read back into what I've written. But that observation was very specific because the essays in "Permanent Red" were written when I was working for the New Statesman. They gave me a great deal of freedom, but as always, there were constraints. After that I never wrote regularly for one paper again and could try to place things where I wanted. Now, there are three or four newspapers in Europe that are willing to translate my articles as soon as they are written. So the only constraints I have are those I impose on myself. It's an incredible luxury for a writer.

Q: Your political stance seems to have remained remarkably consistent over the years, yet also responsive to changing events. Is that your sense of it?

A: I hope that is true, but it's for others to judge. Just as a kind of visceral thing, I have never felt close to the politically powerful, even when I was more or less on their side or I thought they were on mine. It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.

Q: You wrote in 1982 that "the future cannot be trusted . . . the moment of truth is now, and more and more it is poetry that receives this truth." Would you say the same today?

A: I would. Perhaps it's even more true. I said almost exactly that in writing about an anthology just published called "Staying Alive." Its subtitle is "Real Poems for Unreal Times." Real poetry now has a kind of political urgency. For example, there's a wonderful poem in the anthology by Kenneth Rexroth about Christmas. There's no political content in it, but it addresses experiences and observations absent from the official political discourse we are subjected to. Because it recalls us to what isn't any longer said in politics, it has paradoxically a kind of political immediacy. Poetry also honors our sense that we need to clean the language before we can use it properly.

Q: Do you distinguish the truth of fiction from that of exposition or argument?

A: Yes, at one level, because if I'm writing about the Gulf War, for example, I try to be as careful as possible with every fact and quotation. With a story, one doesn't have that obligation to what is already there.

But at another level they are the same. What I would mean by "truth" is a question of the precision of the words, of their sequences, how the spaces between them encourage the reader to come as close as possible to the experience described. Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

Q: What's the most noteworthy book you've read lately?

A: Arundhati Roy recently published a book of essays titled "Power Politics. " For several reasons, I think it's remarkable.

First, like Robert Capa the photographer, she goes in very close. Secondly, she is passionate. The third thing is that she's insolent. And fourth, even when describing terrible events, terrible things, she never loses the sense that there is something wonderful about life. That combination makes for something very special.

Q: You've written almost nothing about Asian art. Why is that?

A: It's simply circumstantial. I've never been to Asia, I know little about it. But I don't see insurmountable barriers to understanding Asian art. I don't think language is necessarily a problem. There are artists such as Shih- t'ao who are incredible; he's right there beside Rembrandt.

By contrast there are arts of very ancient civilizations, such as the Aztec,

that seem very hard to approach from afar.

Q: How frequently have your opinions of artworks or artists changed?

A: When I look at a work of art now the kind of thing that happens in that looking has not changed. But of course one's estimates or appreciations change.

For example, when I first saw the work of Mark Rothko, I thought he was an interesting painter, but that's all. Now I see that he was a colossally original master.

Over a period of time, one's sense of an artist's oeuvre changes. Take Giacometti, for example. When we looked at his sculptures and drawings after the Second World War, they seemed to express a kind of existential pain. Now you can look at the same work and find that it appears incredibly affirmative about human energy and determination.

Q: Are artworks still a point of departure for discussing matters of ethical and political urgency?

A: It seems to me that the visual arts have opened up enormously, with much more possibility of public participation. Instead of becoming a narrower subject, they've become more open.

But whatever one is writing, one is trying to tell the story of being here at this moment in time. Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.